Monday afternoon while flipping though a collection of old columns I ran across one from April 14, 2005. Sixteen years ago to the date and the headline read “Praying that all stays calm for a while.”
I was publisher of The Rankin Record in our neighboring county to the west at the time, and apparently April being April in Mississippi we were experiencing some rather intense weather.
“The weather prognosticators say it’s going to be bad,” I wrote. Same goes for the last several weeks. Tornadoes, yep. Winds in excess of 70 miles per hour, same again. Hail, yep that too! Sirens were blaring then, I heard them Friday night as well. Television constantly “interrupting regularly scheduled programming” for a weather update. Honestly it is beginning to seem like the storm updates are the “regularly scheduled programming.”
I’ve told this story a hundred times — well maybe not a hundred but a bunch — but, many, many years ago when I was a Boy Scout, and den chief of my little brother’s Cub Scout pack, we were returning home from a Scout function, I think a skating party at the Newton Roller Rink. It had been storming all day and just as my mom was turning the big ole LTD into our driveway, brother Richard said, “what’s that,” as he pointed to a huge black mass just behind the school building across from our house.
“Oh my God, it’s a tornado,” I can still hear my late mother screaming as we sped away.
That tornado didn’t look anything like the pictures I had seen before or since. It was on the ground and so close to us that you couldn’t make out a funnel cloud at all. It was more like this big boiling darkness. You could see all kinds of things like trees and parts of people’s houses boiling up high into the air. It was very scary.
It also was something you never forget. I think I was about 13 or 14 at the time — I know I didn’t have my driver’s license — but I have a vivid memory of my brother’s question, my mother’s answer, and that boiling storm.
I also have a vivid memory of the old warehouse we took shelter under, Parker Sansing’s Cucumber Shed, along with a few other people trying to outwit the tornado. Just as we crawled under that cement foundation, the downpour began and rushing waters started pouring in upon us. That was almost as scary as the funnel we were trying to avoid. Moments later all was calm.
Then about 30 or so years ago my wife and I were living in Carrollton in North Central Mississippi when a big storm blew through there. We were wallpapering the dining room of our 100-year-old house when down below our hill we heard this weird sound that when I think about it today, still sounded like a giant vacuum cleaner jsut as I thought back then.
Moments later it was gone and we turned back to our task. “I wonder what that was,” I remember asking. A little while later the buzz of chainsaws could be heard where a tornado had blown though. Amazing how one’s mind holds on to things like that when we can’t, at times, remember what we did last weekend.
All we ended up getting at our house this past weekend was a lot of rain and a little hail. Other folks, I saw on the news, got a lot of hail and a little rain. I’ll take ours over theirs.
There is a good bit of water flowing in the woods and waterways this week. Sunday afternoon we were up around Coal Bluff riding through the country side and at one place along the road where some land clearing was being done a bulldozer was about half submerged. I suppose the storm slipped up on whomever that belonged to too.
It was not raining at this writing on Monday. Actually it was a very pretty day. Don’t let your guard down, though. It’ll be back. After all it is April in Mississippi and I’m still praying things stay calm all these years later.
